Many methods exist to enable a user to enter text into an electronic device such as, for example, a desktop computer, a laptop computer, a cellular phone, a smartphone, a personal digital assistant (PDA), a tablet computer, a navigation system, a portable media player, or another computing device. A common approach is for characters to be entered using a physical or a virtual keyboard. To aid text entry, some electronic devices use auto-complete, text prediction, or auto-correct techniques. A variety of techniques are in current usage or are known to those of ordinary skill in the art. Some techniques predict the next characters to be entered or guess likely spelling corrections for misspelled words and present the user with a number of selectable choices via a user interface. In a graphical user interface, a user may be required to select a suggested word or phrase from the presented options by ‘clicking’ on a displayed option with a computer mouse or ‘touching’ an option displayed on a touch screen. Both of these approaches require the user to move from keyboard, thus interrupting the text entry.
It would be useful to provide a way, during text entry via a keyboard, to enable user selection of suggested text without requiring a user to move from the keyboard.